Philip Roth In Context

Download or read book Philip Roth in Context written by Maggie McKinley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by leading scholars on Philip Roth from around the globe, this book offers new insight into the various contexts that inform his body of work. It opens with an overview of Roth's life and literary influences, before turning to important critical, geographical, theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts. It closes with focused meditations on the various iterations of Roth's legacy, from the screen to international translations of his work to his signature stylistic imprint on American letters. Together, all of these chapters reveal Roth's range as a writer, as he interrogates American national identity and history, and explores the dimensions of the individual self.

Download or read book The Philip Roth We Don't Know written by Jacques Berlinerblau and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Let it be said, Philip Roth was never uncontroversial. From his first book, Roth scandalized literary society as he questioned Jewish identity and sexual politics in postwar America. Scrutiny and fierce rebukes of the renowned author, for everything from chauvinism to anti-Semitism, followed him his entire career. But the public discussions of race and gender and the role of personal history in fiction have deepened in the new millennium. In his latest book, Jacques Berlinerblau offers a critical new perspective on Roth’s work by exploring it in the era of autofiction, highly charged racial reckonings, and the #MeToo movement. The Philip Roth We Don’t Know poses provocative new questions about the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and the Zuckerman trilogy first by revisiting the long-running argument about Roth’s misogyny within the context of #MeToo, considering the most current perceptions of artists accused of sexual impropriety and the works they create, and so resituating the Roth debates. Berlinerblau also examines Roth’s work in the context of race, revealing how it often trafficked in stereotypes, and explores Roth’s six-decade preoccupation with unstable selves, questioning how this fictional emphasis on fractured personalities may speak to the author’s own mental state. Throughout, Berlinerblau confronts the critics of Roth —as well as his defenders, many of whom were uncritical friends of the famous author—arguing that the man taught us all to doubt "pastorals," whether in life or in our intellectual discourse.

Download or read book Understanding Philip Roth written by Matthew A. Shipe and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated—and controversial—authors of the twentieth century Philip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War. Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment—these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.

Download or read book Roth Unbound written by Claudia Roth Pierpont and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical evaluation of Philip Roth—the first of its kind—that takes on the man, the myth, and the work Philip Roth is one of the most renowned writers of our time. From his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and the explosion of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 to his haunting reimagining of Anne Frank's story in The Ghost Writer ten years later and the series of masterworks starting in the mid-eighties—The Counterlife, Patrimony, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The HumanStain—Roth has produced some of the great American literature of the modern era. And yet there has been no major critical work about him until now. Here, at last, is the story of Roth's creative life. Roth Unbound is not a biography—though it contains a wealth of previously undisclosed biographical details and unpublished material—but something ultimately more rewarding: the exploration of a great writer through his art. Claudia Roth Pierpont, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has known Roth for nearly a decade. Her carefully researched and gracefully written account is filled with remarks from Roth himself, drawn from their ongoing conversations. Here are insights and anecdotes that will change the way many readers perceive this most controversial and galvanizing writer: a young and unhappily married Roth struggling to write; a wildly successful Roth, after the uproar over Portnoy, working to help writers from Eastern Europe and to get their books known in the West; Roth responding to the early, Jewish—and the later, feminist—attacks on his work. Here are Roth's family, his inspirations, his critics, the full range of his fiction, and his friendships with such figures as Saul Bellow and John Updike. Here is Roth at work and at play. Roth Unbound is a major achievement—a highly readable story that helps us make sense of one of the most vital literary careers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Download or read book Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Perspectives and Uneasy Passages written by Velichka D. Ivanova and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book like this is long overdue because not many are aware of the numerous intersections between Philip Roth's fiction and world literature. In highlighting these intersections and uneasy passages, this comparative approach offers an important contribution to Philip Roth studies as well as to comparative literary study in general. The fourteen chapters on this book summon Roth's intertextual links to authors ranging from the anonymous writer of the medieval play Everyman, through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Crane, Ellison, Coover, and the New York intellectuals in the United States, to Swift, Chekhov, Svevo, Kafka, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Camus, and Klíma in Europe, and on to Coetzee in South Africa. The book does not deal with all the works in Roth's canon, but it offers a selection of works representing the different stages of Roth's development as a writer. By offering new readings of both well-studied and lesser-studied works, sometimes in unexpected company, the book discloses the critical difference that comparative scholarship can affect. The uneasy passages the book opens will not exhaust the numerous intersections between Roth and the work of other writers. The book's contribution is to place Roth's fiction firmly in a larger transnational context. Far from insular, Roth's work appears as deeply rooted in the American canon while at the same time showing a remarkable openness, a persistent need for contact with his European forebears, and true engagement with contemporary world literature. The transnational perspective of the book makes it important for the rapidly growing field of transatlantic and transnational American studies. The book will be value to collections in American literature and Jewish studies, comparative literature and criticism, and transatlantic and transnational American studies.

Download or read book Nemesis written by Philip Roth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

Download or read book The Human Stain written by Philip Roth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-05-08 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal). It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."